The question of whether nature or nurture takes precedence in our ongoing debate about human behavior just won’t go away. Advances in genomics have only made the matter more contentious. Our parents not only bequeathed us a unique array of genes, they raised us, directing, consciously or not, the way we look at the world and how we respond to it. They, in turn, having been subject to the very same process. And so it has gone for a mind-boggling ten thousand generations or so.
Each of us comes into a world that presents itself as a given. At some point we began to wonder how it came to be the way it is, and why we are as we are.
Or perhaps I should say, why they are as they are, since the question seems to have first arisen as an outcome of groups that had developed in isolation bumping up against each other as they became engaged in peaceful trade or violent contention. One of the earliest thinkers to consider the matter was Hippocrates (of Hippocratic Oath fame), a great old Greek medico and beard scratcher who ascribed differences in the appearance and behavior of various peoples to the climate and geography that had nurtured them. In addition to serving as an explanation of difference, it’s a kind of Ur text for notions of race and racialism that still fascinate and afflict us.
For us moderns, the viaduct for such ideas has unquestionably been Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, above, whose 1748 work, Spirit of the Laws, was a seminal foray into social science with a powerful impact on Enlightenment-era anthropology and political thought. In it, he recapitulated, expanded upon and refined the Hippocratic belief that, working over the longterm, environment will determine not only a specific human morphology, but behavior, values, law, art, etc. The first English translation appeared in 1750. It has never been out of print.
We can never be entirely certain of how ancient ideas thread their way through the labyrinth of time or how at various moments they seem to have more than usual appeal, but in Montesquieu’s case there are some intriguing clues. He was a Bordeaux native whose family and fortune were deeply connected to the region’s centuries-old wine trade. As as winegrower himself, the baron would have been intimately familiar with the notion of terroir, a concept universally acknowledged in his time and still widely credited in our own: namely, that the character of a given wine can be ascribed primarily to the vineyard environment (prevailing geologic and meteorological conditions, often regional but sometimes minutely specfic) where its fruit was sourced.
We’re not suggesting that Monty would have derived his concept of environment as the primary driver of variety in human character and social structures solely from his experience as a vintner and wine merchant. There were, no doubt, a variety of theory-building materials available to him for the job. One can at least say with confidence that he would have found it consonant with the natural processes he had observed in his lifelong experience e with winegrowing, and that he would have seen it as one more prop supporting his concepts.
Can big ideas really come out of a glass of wine? What say we pull a cork and mull it over?